Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2022.12

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

The Green Mile (1999) — 8/10

I’ve seen this movie before, but don’t have any notes on it. It’s the best Stephen King adaptation after Shawshank Redemption. The film starts in 1999, with Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) in an old-age home, taking regular walks to a shed in the woods to peek in a window.

Paul works in a prison in Louisiana in 1935, in the capital wing, where death-row prisoners are kept. He and his coworkers Brutus Howell (David Morse), Dean Stanton (Barry Pepper), Harry Terwilliger (Jeffrey DeMunn) are a sympathetic bunch of chaps. They are forced to work with a newer co-worked named Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison), who’s a real sonofabitch and useless, to boot.

Percy agrees to move on to greener pastures, but only if he’s allowed to run an execution. The others reluctantly agree. There are a few prisoners on the mile: the really offensive and off-the-wall “Wild Bill” Wharton (Sam Rockwell), the sweet, relatively innocent, and very remorseful Eduard Delacroix (Michael Jeter), Arlen Bitterbuck (Graham Greene), who’s the first prisoner to go, and, finally, gentle giant John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan).

John’s been accused of murdering two little girls, but he’s as gentle as a lamb and he’s possessed of special healing powers. These powers allow him to suck the hurt out of a creature or creatures and take it into himself. It makes him very tired.

John heals Paul’s terribly painful bladder infection, after which his life and love life are restored. His wife Jan (Bonnie Hunt) notices immediately. Wild Bill makes a huge nuisance of himself, getting a few stints in the padded cell, whereas Percy is more sly and sneaky—and a terrible guard, to boot, as he fails to help subdue Wild Bill at least once.

Percy has it in for Del, both because he’s gay and because he seems to derive so much pleasure from his talented mouse Mr. Jingles, who zips around the green mile with impunity. The guards joke that they’re going to take him down to mouse city in Florida for Del, after, well, you know. Del is tickled that Mr. Jingles will continue his illustrious career after he’s gone. Percy gets to Mr. Jingles and stomps him flat. John holds out his hand to Paul, “give him to me; maybe it’s not too late.” John is able to bring Mr. Jingles back from the dead and Del takes better care. Percy is flabbergasted.

Percy gets to run Del’s execution and he does his worst. He fails to wet the sponge, causing Del to burst into flames and botching the whole execution. Well, not botching it so badly that Del doesn’t die, but botching it so that Del suffers terribly first. Percy is a true monster. John feels Del’s pain through his gift.

The guards lock Percy away in the rubber room as punishment while they sneak John out of the prison in order to help heal the warden’s wife of her brain tumor. John absorbs her pain and heals her. When they return, they have to release Percy, but they threaten him to reveal all that he’d done. John releases the “pain” into Percy, causing him to flip out and shoot Wild Bill. It turns out that Wild Bill was the monster responsible for the deaths of the girls for which John Coffey was convicted.

The remaining officers are now distraught, knowing that Coffey should not even be in prison, to say nothing of on death row. But John sees it differently. For him, the world is a cruel, awful place that he, through is powers, is forced to experience as a large, open sore. He insists that they execute him, but not before he gets to watch a movie with them—Top Hat. He asks not to be hooded because he’s afraid of the dark. The officers solemnly help him through the ritual, fighting back tears. It would be the last execution for Paul and Brutus.

Paul reveals at the end that his visits to the shed are to commune with Mr. Jingles, who’s still alive after all this time—and that Paul himself is 108 years old.

RRR (2022) — 9/10

The visual spectacle in this film is nearly without parallel. Every scene is highly dramatic. It was three hours of non-stop action and high drama and twists and turns.

It starts in 1920, during the British Raj, where we see the cruelty of administrator Buxton (Ray Stevenson) and his even crueler wife Catherine (Alison Doody). They abduct a talented young singer and henna artist Malli (Twinkle Sharma) and bring her back to the capital. The tribe is distraught, but not without recourse. They have a champion: Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) who will bring her back. He travels as a Muslim named Akhtar.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to A. Rama Raju (Ram Charan Teja), an incredibly handsome, talented, strong, linguistically gifted, and rising police officer in a spectacular scene in which he apprehends a criminal single-handedly out of a roiling crowd of protesters. Catherine enlists Raju to help find and stop Bheem (although they have no idea what he looks like).

Bheem and Raju end up working together to save a boy from a train accident. I like that there’s tension in the scene where the train fell into the water and capsized the boys’s boat simply because no-one knows how to swim. I cannot emphasize enough how spectacular everything is—and yet it doesn’t feel over the top because it’s so earnest and we are watching a film about good people.

Bheem and Raju grow close, they become best friends. Bheem drives Baju around as Raju looks for the perpetrator (who’s actually going to end up being Bheem). Raju helps Bheem court Jenny, Scott’s neice, unaware that Bheem has a dual purpose: he wants to get into the Scott compound in order to free Malli. Bheem finds and meets Malli but can only assure her that he will eventually rescue her.

Raju and Bheem go to a wedding at the residence and it ends up in a spectacular dance-off in which a cartoonishly oafish and terrible Brit has his ass handed to him. Raju and Bheem are transcendent. The ladies all swoon for Raju, whereas Jenny has eyes only for Bheem.

During an interrogation, a very clever prisoner threw a banded krait at Raju, poisoning him. The prisoner tells him that only the Gonds know the cure. Luckily, his best friend Bheem is from that tribe—although Raju still thinks he’s a Muslim. During the ministrations and rescue of Raju’s life, he notices that Bheem isn’t who he says he is. Since Bheem also doesn’t know who Raju really is, he confesses everything to his best friend, trusting that his friend will understand and see the nobility of his mission.

Soon after, Bheem and his men attack Scott’s compound with wild animals (tigers, etc.). Raju is there to defend the compound. They are now on opposite sides. The battle there is also incredibly spectacular, with Bheem and Raju ended up on a roof, helping each other not die, but resulting in Bheem’s surrender. Raju is promoted for having brought in Bheem alive, but he is conflicted. We now learn that he’s only a police officer because he’s a mole, working his way up the hierarchy in order to bring it down from above. He had pledged to his village to bring a weapon for everyone. He is close to his goal of having control over a gigantic arsenal of rifles.

The next scene is Bheem’s public flogging, egged on by a Catherine suffused with bloodlust. Of course, Raju is in charge of the flogging. Of course, Bheem does not submit. Instead, he sings in defiance, egging the crowd on to overthrowing the whole square. Raju realizes that Bheem’s sheer animal power is a much more powerful weapon than an entire arsenal of weapons. Bheem’s power to inspire is much more useful.

Raju betrays his post in order to help Malli and Bheem escape—except that Bheem doesn’t quite see it like that, yet. He doesn’t yet know that Raju has switched sides. Raju is grievously injured and taken prisoner, thrown into a torture chamber. He resists, continuing to do pull-ups even without food or water and with his injuries. Rambo-squared!

Bheem is on the run and is almost caught, except that Sita (Alia Bhatt) lies about an outbreak of smallpox, which terrified the police into leaving. Bheem learns that Sita is Raju’s fiancé and learns further from her that Raju is actually a revolutionary—a brother and friend in common cause.

Bheem infiltrates the prison where Raju is being held and frees him. They retreat into the forest, get ripped and armed, then hold off prodigious numbers of soldiers while the forest burns and Scott watches from the top of his compound from afar. The pair hurl Bheem’s flaming motorcycle into the compound, landing squarely in Scott’s immense supplies of ammunition and TNT. Catherine dies gruesomely in the subsequent explosion, while Scott remains, dazed, in the rubble. Bheem and Raju execute him.

Sita, Raju, Bheem, and Jenny all live happily ever after.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) — 6/10

So this is what most people think counts as science fiction now. This movie is ostensibly about multiverses, but it’s much more about just doing weird shit in 2-3–minute skits, all bound up in a kind of a Kung Fu movie. I love the hell out of Michelle Yeoh, but this is absolutely not the breakout role that everyone said it was.

At one point, she’s fighting a guy so that he doesn’t drop himself on an IRS award that looks like a butt-plug[1] because doing something weird and unexpected allows you to connect to more-talented selves in other universes. Comprende? She manages to stop one guy from doing it, but then another, bigger guy shows up to positively suplex himself on it and then fight her with the butt plug dangling from his ass the whole time. This joke is so good that it goes on for long minutes, at which point the first guy shows up, with an even longer trophy sticking out of his butt. OMG hilarious.

Breakout role, indeed.

She wins the fight by pulling the awards out of their respective asses, taking their powers away. She doesn’t get much of a break. Her next superpower is the ability to fight only with her pinkies. I’m starting to feel sorry for Michelle Yeoh and to wonder what sort of a bet she’d lost.

And then there’s her husband Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), who came out of retirement for this movie—he’d previously played Data in The Goonies and Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He gets lines like, “Evelyn, your cray plan to save your daughter has pissed off everyone in the multiverse…but it just might work!” This is utter dreck. It’s not even funny. This is like a children’s movie, but for adults. I weep for us all. The Idiocracy will win, in the end.

Sorry, now poor Evelyn is projectile-vomiting on the ground like she’s in a Monty Python revival. Her daughter Joy / Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) laughs and sings as she walks away. The movie pretends to be over, but then it’s not! OMG so edgy. Jamie Lee Curtis does her level best, but she’s just waving her hot-dog fingers around and it’s just. not. working.

But maybe it’s just me. I paused the movie until tomorrow (it’s not drawing me in enough to spend another hour on it), but then this article appeared in my newsfeed, Everything Everywhere All at Once Leads Chicago Film Critics Nominations by Brian Tallerico (RogerEbert.com).

““EEAAO” not only appeared in Best Picture, but also competes in Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and a number of craft categories.”

Oh, come on. Really? Is this a Wakanda thing? I didn’t get that one either. It was trash.

Life (2017) — 5/10

This one joins Prometheus in the pantheon of films about “ostensibly super-smart people who can’t follow basic biological-containment and quarantining protocols”. Of course it’s true-to-life because no-one follows quarantining protocols.

• They should never have gotten Hugh (Ariyon Bakare) out. They had no way of knowing whether he’d been contaminated by the alien. They knew it was a multi-celled creature where each cell was identical, but just assumed that it would act as a single creature—and not split any parts of itself off.
• Just mixing air is stupid with viruses on Earth, to say nothing of extraterrestrial, completely unresearched, and ostensibly sentient ones.
• Why did the valves close one by one? Why not all at once? What kind of containment system is this? Answer: a suspenseful one! Spoiler alert: the creature managed to slip out the last valve before it closed.
• Why didn’t Kat (Olga Dykhovichnaya) just kick herself off into space if she was going to sacrifice herself anyway? Her death was a complete waste, even though she knowingly committed suicide. Instead, she floated away once dead (there was no reason she should, as she wasn’t providing an impulse, but whatever) and remained close enough for Calvin to jump back to the station—and to keep the movie going!
• Why do they assume that Calvin will stay outside the station? It got out; it can get back in. They have no idea which entry or exit it used.
• Now they want to block entries, like the thrusters. Their awesome plan is to just fire the thrusters when Calvin tries to crawl inside. Their stroke of genius is to use the temperature sensors (non-scientific geniuses and babies call them thermometers) to detect Calvin. Unfortunately, they’d used up all of their brainpower and didn’t think about what randomly firing their thrusters would do to their orbit.
• It was bound to happen: the Calvin POV shot. Soooo scary.
• So Calvin was on Hugh’s leg and was in the cabin with them the whole time. Sneaky little bugger. No idea how he’s so clever. No explanation needed. Also, they go back to get Hugh, who lives for just long enough to … tell them nothing. There was nothing gained from going back to him.
• Finally, though, someone’s thinking: they sent up a Soyuz capsule to boost the whole damned thing out of orbit and into deep space. Good idea. I’m sure the intrepid adventurer-scientists will figure out some way to foil the plan in a misguided effort to save someone who’s just going to die anyway. Called it. This time it was a completely stupid sacrifice for Sho. Also, it takes a long time to vent a capsule though a giant gaping hole, but, luckily, the capsule on the end is magically 100% full of air as soon as they close the bulkhead.
• Why would temperature drop rapidly? The thing is very clearly in the sun every time they show it. Without HVAC, it would be overheating.
• Why did it wrap itself around him, ignoring the candle until he waved it around? Did it somehow not notice the heat signature until he made it “enticing”?
• Why did Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson) not close her helmet until very late, choosing instead to freeze in the frigid air? None of this makes any sense.
• How does Calvin know what a control stick is? Why would it know to prevent him from using it?
• Why do the subtitles say [speaking Vietnamese] instead of just translating what he said to English?

The ending is good, though! Spoiler alert: they hit space debris, which messes up their lifeboats, so Jake ends up on Earth instead of outer space, while Miranda ends up in outer space! Nice. An extra point for you.

National Treasure (2004) — 8/10

Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicholas Cage) comes from a line of American historians, which include his father Patrick Gates (Jon Voight) and his grandfather John Adams Gates (Christopher Plummer).

We meet Ben in the frozen north, unearthing an old shipwreck in which he finds a scrimshaw pipe with a code that tells him there’s a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. He parts ways with his greedy partner Ian (Sean Bean), who swears he will steal the document in order to find the treasure. Ben and his colleague Riley (Justin Bartha) plan their own heist to get there first. Ben befriends curator Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) in order to get her fingerprints and get into the cleaning room where the document is taken after Riley overheats the sensors on the frame.

Ben ends up with the document, then ducks into the gift shop, where he’s made to pay $35 for the real Declaration of Independence. Abigail is hot on his tail. Ian and his crew are there and are packing heat. Ben and Riley grab Abigail to get her out of the hail of gunfire. We get our first chase scene. Ian ends up with the gift-shop version while Ben keeps the original. Abigail is angry. This is peak Nicholas Cage.

The chief investigator Sandusky (Harvey Keitel) is on the scene. He doesn’t figure in this much, though. The film is mostly Ben, Abigail, and Riley treasure-hunting from one American heritage site to another, collecting special glasses that they can use to read the special writing on the back of the Declaration of Independence and finally ending up far below ground at the vast hoard of gold and treasure left by the founders of the country, who were all illuminati or masons or whatever.

Ben has to wheel and deal to get Abigail freed, his family name cleared, and the entire treasure secured in the public domain, with a tidy 1% finder’s fee for himself and Riley and Abigail. Riley drives away in a ridiculously overpriced and overpowered car to prove the point that they didn’t get enough money out of the deal.

What’s actually lovely is that there are no smartphones and the web is still quite primitive. They can’t just snap high-quality pictures of everything; they have to actually take things with them.

I saw it in German this time.

Dune (2021) — 8/10

This movie is very pretty. However, it actually fails to live up to some of the precedents set by Lynch’s Dune (reviewed last year). Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) uses The Voice on his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), but it sounds weak compared to Kyle McLachlan’s rendition in the other film. All of the familiar characters are here: Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), and mentat Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson). Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is not blessed with great lines. I can’t remember whether this one comes from the book, but it fell kind of flat: “On Caladan, we ruled with air and sea power; on Arrakis, we’ll have to use desert power.”

The Harkonnen’s are pretty good, though! Dave Bautista as Raban and Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Harkonnen were inspired choices. Their first scene together was great. And the scenery on all the worlds is very Villeneuvian—lots of long shots of large, temple-like structures, pointillistically lit in blue or yellow or orange, as suits the scene. The ships are gigantic, windowless, and have no visible means of propulsion. The temples on Arrakis reminded me very much of Serious Sam’s Karnak levels.

The ornithopters are lovely. I have no idea who thought having eight independent motors would be a good idea on a desert planet when a helicopter with only one (or perhaps two) motors is known to be terrible in the desert (Apache helicopters went down with depressing frequency in the U.S.‘s occupations).

Rather quickly, we get to the Gom Jabbar scene, where the reverend mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) tests Paul. He is advised by his doctor, Dr. Yueh (Chang Chen), who will be pivotal later. The Gom Jabbar scene was very well-done. The only shame was that they made so much noise that no-one will be able to actually remember the quote from the book,

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And, when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

The next act is on Arrakis. The Atreides arrive. They are clad in neck-to-toe metallic armor that absolutely must be air-conditioned because they walk around in the sun in it. Even when they’re warned that the “sun is getting too high”, they’re standing on a terrace in that armor, using a pair of binoculars and in front of servants who open and close giants doors by hand. The juxtaposition of 19th-century technology and galaxy-spanning ships is jarring. Villeneuve is simply going for an aesthetic, trying to make the unfamiliar familiar—and has presumably plumbed the books a bit, which had quite an archaic and monastic feel to them, at times.

Chalamet’s Paul moves a lot more than McLachlan’s did during the “Hunter Seeker” scene. It wasn’t nearly as tense as Lynch’s version.

In the next scene, Baron Harkonnen says “there are no satellites over Arrakis; the Atreides will die in the dark.” How can it possibly be that there are no satellites over the only source of the spice that makes interstellar travel possible?

Duncan Idaho returns from his sojourn in the Fremen sietch, accompanied by their leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem). These scenes are piling on top of each other—Villeneuve seems to be running into the same problems that Lynch ran into: too much content that warrants a stately approach, but that must be hurried to fit the format. Dune might have been better as a series of 10 episodes rather than a single feature-length film.

In the next scene, Duncan explains all of the Fremen equipment, but I have no idea how they “invent” or even “manufacture” anything on a planet so plainly inhospitable to mining or manufacturing. But there are metals everywhere! Massive amounts of metals everywhere. The aesthetic is very much the original Star Wars here, which I very much like. In the spirit of the age, the liaison Dr. Liet Kynes (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) is now a black woman, but that at least somewhat compensates for Herbert’s dearth of female characters in his books. (I remember only Jessica, Alia, Mohiam, and Chani among dozens and dozens of male roles.)

It just seems to be impossible for anyone to make a movie that doesn’t break reality by making the main characters keep their head protection off in situations where it would surely kill them to do so. They all go into the desert with their still-suits on, but with their headgear off, positively blasting their moisture into the desiccated air. They will do this again and again, even when they need to convince the Fremen that they’re not morons.

Jessica sitting cross-legged in the tiny alcove looks so good. Segue to the Sardaukar army planet, where it’s raining on the troops being prepared for battle. This scene, too, is visually sumptuous. Director Villeneuve has a lovely eye.

Leto’s poison-gas attack on the Baron fails. We see Harkonnens being gross and evil. The Sardaukar attack. Duncan Idaho tears a swath through them. The Fremen do damage. The Sardaukar prevail nonetheless, by strength of number and by being pretty bad-ass themselves. No-one uses any projectile weapons, which is nice and quiet and pretty great. They use swords. It is not really apparent that they are slowing down to strike through the shield, though.

Paul and Jessica escape into the desert with the help of Dr. Kynes and Duncan Idaho, who makes a last stand to buy them time. Dr. Kynes gives them the two-person ornithopter. Before she can catch a ride on Shai-hulud, though, the Sardaukar catch up to her and they all end up riding in its belly. Paul and Jessica flee through a sandstorm, crash-land, and make it to the rock just in time. Shai-hulud rears up, but the Fremen distract it with a thumper.

Stuff happens. Jessica subdues Stilgar. Paul ends up having to fight and kill a Fremen. They are accepted into the tribe. They head off into the desert. Chani says something stupid, like “This is only the beginning.” 🙄 It was a bit long and a bit boring in the last third—after being hurried in the first third—but I give it an extra point for being beautiful.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) — 7/10

Nicholas Cage (Nicholas Cage) is working hard, but hardly working. He’s not getting the role he wants, so he accepts a $1M job that his agent Richard Fink (Neil Patrick Harris) urges him to take. He arrives in Mallorca and meets Javi Guttierez (Pedro Pascal), who is either an olive mogul or a weapons dealer who’s kidnapped the daughter of the president of Spain. The CIA claims the latter. They engage Cage to help them get the girl back. Cage has become fast friends with Guttierez, though. He promises to read his script and everything.

Cage investigates, playing the spy, getting in deep with Guttierez, who’s totally excited that they’re going to make a movie together. It’s still unclear whether he’s a criminal. He seems like a teddy bear. Pascal is great here. The rapport between him and Cage is spot-on.

I kind of like how meta it all gets, where they’re on acid talking about how the movie that they’re going to write together should have a scene where the main characters are on drugs and freaking out with paranoia, which is what they’re doing as they’re discussing the possible scene. Cage leaves Javi sleeping in the car and goes looking for the girl in the location where the CIA tells him she’s being held. Javi shows up and lets him in—it’s a Nicholas Cage museum instead.

He meets up with agent Vivian (Tiffany Haddish) and reports that the girl wasn’t there, but that “good news, the script’s cookin’! It’s like Cassavetes meets Innaritu with a dash of Von Trier.” Cage tries to talk to Javi about a kidnapped girl in their movie, to see how he would react. Instead, Javi intuits that Cage is feeling guilty about how he’d left things with his family, that his issues are “bleeding into the work”. So Javi lies to Cage’s ex-wife Olivia (Sharon Horgan) and daughter Addy (Lily Mo Sheen) to get them to fly to Mallorca. Cage is terrified that Javi intends to use them as physical leverage, but Javi seems to genuinely want Cage to work through his shit with his family.

It’s really hard to tell, but Javi doesn’t seem to be who the CIA says he is. Even his assistant Gabriela (Alessandra Mastronardi) doesn’t seem to know that he’s a terrorist. They talk as if they’re business associates and she’s really hoping he’ll be able to make his movie with Cage. It turns out that it’s Javi’s business partner and cousin Lucas (Paco León) who’s the crime boss and who’s responsible for having kidnapped the president’s daughter.

Lucas tells Javi that Cage is working for the U.S. government. Lucas presents him with an ultimatum: kill Nicholas Cage to save his own life. At the same time, Vivian tells Cage that he’s going to have to find a gun and take out Javi. The encounter is all John Woo-style, slo-mo, wide-scene, opera music. At this point, they’re still very meta, describing their movie as,

“Javi: start[ing] out as a beautiful character piece and slowly change into a …
Cage: Hollywood blockbuster. Then there’s something for everyone.”

They’re describing the movie that they’re in.

They get out to the cliffs where they’re deciding how they’re going to shoot each other when they realize they’re each wearing two halves of two pairs of shoes. They reminisce about what great friends they’ve so quickly become. They confront each other and learn each other’s respective secrets. They team up and it’s not an action movie, with Lucas’s henchmen chasing them, but it’s totally 80s-style with two motorcycles chasing them.

They dispatch the henchmen, go back to Javi’s house to learn that Addy’s been kidnapped, Vivian’s been compromised (her partner’s dead), and they need to rescue everyone and save the world. Gabriella and Olivia jump in the back of the jeep and they get started.

Olivia and Nicholas walk in through the front gates as Giorgio and Barbara, long-hidden heads of a crime syndicate who Lucas is expecting. They bluff their way in. They get all the way to the girls when their cover is blown. Cage pulls a Nicholas Cage and continues the bluff, taking Lucas hostage. Javi goes in to help him. They perform the required rescue and get away, showing up just in time to save the ladies and girls from Carlos.

Obligatory jeep-chase coming up. Things happen. They end up in the embassy grounds with Lucas right on their tail. Segue to the movie of the movie, where Demi Moore plays Olivia and Anna MacDonald plays Addy. Pan out to the premiere of the movie with a standing ovation.

“Fink: We’re back!
Cage: Not that we went anywhere.”

This isn’t the first meta movie that Cage has made; Adaptation was another (review here). Nicholas Cage plays himself very well. This movie reminds me a bit of JCVD (review here), a similarly meta movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme, another earnest actor known for doing the work and getting rocky reviews.

Dick (1999) — 5/10

Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene (Michele Williams) are best friends. They’re two high-schoolers from Washington, D.C. in 1974. Arlene’s mom is staying at the Watergate hotel for a while. This is kind of a Forrest Gump-style movie in that the girls are there—and innocuously influential—for most of the significant effects of the 1970s, especially those related to the Nixon (Dan Hedaya) presidency. The girls discover the creeps list, they discover the tape recordings, the discover the Watergate break-in, as well as fingering the perpetrators. They work with Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch) to get the story out. They’re super-ditzy, though. There are a bunch of other people in it, but none of the characters really click. David Foley is wasted as Bob Haldeman, Jim Breuer is kind of empty as John Dean, Harry Shearer as G. Gordon Liddy is barely there, Saul Rubinek overacts his Henry Kissinger. I expected something a bit cleverer.

The Ninth Configuration (1980) — 6/10

The movie starts by playing a maudlin song named San Antone—the entire song—over a blurry shot of a castle in the rain. There is a brief interior shot of a man mooning out the window, but we’re soon back outside, looking in through the rain.

The castle is an insane asylum, full of veterans of the Vietnam War.

I was reminded in some places of the films of Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky was a much greater auteur, but I wouldn’t be surprised if director Peter Blatty had seen some of those films. The incessantly pouring rain, the closeups, the voiceovers, the gliding camera, the long shots, the lingering on grotesquely shaped statues and symbols.

“I don’t think evil grows out of madness. I think madness grows out of evil.”

—Col. Vincent Kane

It’s much more darkly comic than Tarkovsky, though. I don’t believe anyone has every accused Tarkovsky of being “comic”. Here, the dialogue is off the wall, with characters like Lt. Bennish (Robert Loggia) really, really chewing into the scenery. Probably the craziest part of this movie isn’t that it stars a puli dog, or any of the dialogue; it’s that it’s set in 1980, but absolutely no-one smokes.

Kane’s cover is blown by a new inmate, who knew him and his exploits in Vietname. He’s revealed as Killer Kane, working through some really bad shit, trying to be a better person. It worked until he recognized the other guy. The actual top psychiatrist turns out to be his brother, trying to help him get well. Shades of Shutter Island with the turn of events.

And then it just devolves into a straight-up 80s-style bar scene with bad-ass biker dudes toying with Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) and Kane. It jut keeps getting more and more bizarre.
Steve Sandor is the primary torturer, at first with mirrored shades, then revealing his heavy mascara, then making Kane say horrible things about the USMC, then tossing Kane around, then dropping into a split in front of a prone Kane to make him lick beer off the floor.

Kane complies with everything until the other biker (Richard Lynch) drops onto Cutshaw’s face, unzips his pants and starts to try to face-fuck him. That’s the last straw for Kane, who shatters Sandor’s beer stein in his hand, dropping him like a sack of potatoes, then takes out the rest of the bar. It’s unclear whether he’s killed them or just knocked them out. They look dead.

Kane returns to his philosophical discussion with Cutshaw, trying to convince him that there is good in the world. Kane takes his own life to prove it. What? I suppose he’s trying to “shock” Cutshaw back to sanity.

Dragon Eyes (2012) — 4/10

This was a pretty bad movie about Hong (Cung Le), who’d recently been released from prison. He moved to the neighborhood of St. Jude to help clean it up. The neighborhood is run by Mister V (Peter Weller) and there are rival gangs that are over-the-top violent, but also become easily tamed when Hong just kung-fus around a bit. Hong had learned his movies in prion from Tiano (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who’s really only a shadowy figure in this movie. He shows some moves during the training sequences and he’s still pretty spry, but it’s nothing like his participation in other movies (e.g., Kickboxer: Vengeance).

The plot was kind of confused, in that relatively large changes in the gangland power structure seemed to happen for no reason. Hong shows up and rents an apartment from an older fellow and his lovely daughter (obviously). He gets into it with a few roughs from the sixth-street gang. He does a few more things, and then suddenly Mister V gives him control over both gangs. This doesn’t go down too well, but Hong kicks the hispanic leader’s ass and now has his utter loyalty.

There’s an outside gang that’s trying to take everything over, but Hong organizes the gangs to fight back—even though he forbids the use of firearms. The citizens of St. Jude are happier with the peace, but then there’s a giant war, Mister V is no longer happy with Hong, and they fight to the death. Hong takes a lot of damage during all of this. His fighting style is much more rough and tumble. Also, there are a couple of scenes where he takes a superhuman amount of damage to his bean, which is wildly and noticeably unrealistic.

Jean Claude Van Damme appears only in Hong’s flashbacks because he’s in prison, so he’s only in training sequences.